Dumb Versus Dumber in Common Core Debate

Nov. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Last week, Arne Duncan, the
secretary of education, picked just the right words to make an
increasingly hot controversy even hotter.

Like many education officials in both parties, Duncan is a
defender of the Common Core initiative to create uniform
academic standards for K-12 education in all states. Resistance
to it, he asserted, comes mainly from “white suburban moms”
who don’t take kindly to hearing that their children aren’t
meeting newly raised standards.

Duncan had to backtrack from the comment, of course, which
also happens to be clearly false. Students aren’t yet being
tested to determine whether they meet the standards, so poor
test results couldn’t be generating a backlash. The contempt
that the remark revealed is real enough, though. Proponents of
the Common Core tend to view its critics as an ignorant mob.
Support for it is, in certain circles, a sign of one’s
seriousness about education reform.

Yet the reform strategy it represents hasn’t been thought
through well, and it seems unlikely to work. The debate that
surrounds it is an extended exercise in missing the point.

Misleading Claims

The initiative’s critics advance an angry populism that is
frequently misinformed. One can certainly imagine Duncan’s
frustration at having to rebut Glenn Beck’s claim that the
standards are leading to mandatory iris scans for schoolkids.
Even less fantastic attacks on the standards are often
overwrought. Take the complaint that they downgrade the study of
literature in favor of “informational texts.” Actually, they
call for a split between fiction and nonfiction across the
curriculum. The split starts at 50-50 in elementary school and
rises to 70 percent informational, 30 percent fictional by the
end of high school. English class, in other words, can be
entirely devoted to literature.

But supporters of the Common Core have their own misleading
claims. They say that its adoption by states has been totally
voluntary, even though state governments had a better shot at
getting a share of federal money and relief from some
regulations if they signed up for it. Supporters also say that
the initiative isn’t a common curriculum, as though there were a
hard and fast distinction between requiring all students to know
specific things at a set time and requiring they be taught them
in a certain order.

What these arguments obscure is that the case for having a
“common core” in the first place is weak. High standards may
be valuable, but why do they have to be common? It isn’t as
though different state standards are a major problem in U.S.
education. There’s more variation in achievement within states
than between them. Common standards may make life a bit easier
for students who move across state lines, but they also mean
that we lose a chance for states to experiment.

Common Core supporters sometimes suggest that with a single
set of standards, states could determine if they’re doing worse
than their neighbors, and that this knowledge will make them
eager to reform their schools. They said something similar about
the No Child Left Behind Act that Congress passed a decade ago:
Parents would learn that schools were failing to make their kids
“proficient” in English and math and would demand reform.

It didn’t work out that way. Many people got mad when the
law labeled their schools failures. State and local officials
responded by setting a lower bar for proficiency. In making his
remark about white suburban moms, Duncan indicated that he
thinks parents will have the same reaction this time. In which
case, what good will the Common Core do?

Real Problem

For that matter, how common will that core really be?
Classroom practice doesn’t always reflect the standards written
in a state’s official documents. That’s one reason the rigor of
state standards doesn’t correlate with student achievement. But
ensuring uniformity in practice would require the kind of heavy-handed central governing body that supporters of the Common Core
strenuously deny they want.

The real problem with the Common Core is not that it
represents Big Brother in the classroom, but that it seems
unlikely to do much to increase the amount of learning that
students do. Perhaps that’s because there’s not much that can be
done on the national level to make K-12 schooling better.

A lot of education reformers find it hard to admit that.
And so the debate over the Common Core is a dismal cycle of
elite disdain and populist outrage, each side feeding the
other’s worst impulses.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor
at National Review.)